


Disquietudes

by TruckThat



Category: Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: M/M, medical sedation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-22
Updated: 2016-05-22
Packaged: 2018-06-10 02:55:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,024
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6936385
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TruckThat/pseuds/TruckThat
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The dark is close. Everything else is so far away that Kylo Ren can't understand why his face is the only thing in Hux's brain except for the columns of Kylo's own medical read-outs. He wonders, from this vast distance, from behind closed eyes, what is wrong with it.</p>
<p>There was... a fight. He will call it a fight, because if it was not that then it was a loss.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Disquietudes

**Author's Note:**

> I am posting this as a standalone fic, although it was written a prologue to a much longer and weirder thing that I may or may not actually write. I'll add it in series if I do. _That_ thing is kylux, but this may read more like a three thousand word character study with morphine... which is essentially what it is. I assure you this is the closest to hitting on someone Kylo Ren has ever come.
> 
> "When I am with some one, I desire solitude; alone, I feel the disquietudes of the void." - _Very Woman (Sixtine)_ , Remy de Gourmont

Kylo Ren comes back to himself afloat, he thinks, in a bacta tank. There's something nigglingly strange about it. He's floating, limp, his eyelids gummed shut by the liquid. (Presumably; he does not test it.) This is not the first time Kylo has ever woken submerged in bacta. Slowly, though, it penetrates through that the strange thing is this: he can hear the medical droids quite clearly, their hushed chirping and the whirrs of fast work being done... very close to his face. Shouldn't be able to hear that in a tank full of bacta gel. Shouldn't be able to smell the burn of cauterization, either.

There's no one in the room except for Kylo. No human medics or officers, no other patients, just the electric signatures of the medi-droids, quiet at their work.

Kylo floats. Nothing is hurting, although most things are numb.

Sometime later, in the dark—although it could be any time of day or night, really; Kylo can't be bothered to open his eyes and check when it's so warm where he is—he realizes that the general is also there.

He can hear him. Not just the flimsis he's rustling around—medical charts—but his thoughts. His head is all numbers and dosages.

High dosages. High enough that Hux, who always calculates the worst possible outcome and is therefore never surprised, is surprised by them.

Oh.

They've drugged Kylo Ren almost into oblivion. It's quite nice. A long, long, asymptotic curve into softest nothing.

Why is he _not_ in bacta? His face is a horrible numb rawness, in a way that he doesn't care about at all except that it means that infinity, even if approached, has not been reached. The dark is close, and everything else is so far away that he can't understand why his face is the only thing in Hux's brain except for the columns of Kylo's own medical read-outs. He wonders, from this vast distance, from behind closed eyes, what is wrong with it.

There was... a fight. He will call it a fight, because if it was not that then it was a loss.

He falls asleep without realizing it and when he wakes up Hux is gone again and the medbay is silent except for its self-sustaining background hums. When Kylo makes a supreme effort and opens his eyes he finds that it really is dark: the half-twilight of a starship on night cycle.

That's a funny thing, about the numbers that were in Hux's head. About Kylo Ren's face (and what's wrong with it) that was in Hux's head too. In his absence Kylo has the time to consider it. Normally, Kylo can hear Hux thinking. Well, he can hear _everyone_ thinking, but Hux is always particularly clear: surface thoughts, statistics and metrics thoughts, thoughts in a line like a regiment of troopers. Careful, precise thoughts, even when they are rash—and in Kylo's experience they almost never are.

Ordinarily Hux's thoughts, even the ones about rates and ratios and means (Hux's _favourite_ thoughts, if such a cold variety of preference could be described as such) run electrically fast and quite shallowly.

Kylo had thought that was the full extent of General Hux: a shallow, brilliant, ice-hardened pool. Keen and efficient and single-purpose as a razor.

Hux has been _shielding_. Hux has been shielding, _Hux_ , who has no more force sensitivity than an Alderaan beach snail—and has been doing it which such absolute and subtle control that it has never once occurred to Kylo that there might be anything beyond that shield.

Only now, in their entire acquaintance, is Hux shaken enough for it to crack. He has lost everything. He is _afraid_ , which Kylo has felt from him before but maybe apprehension would have been a better word for it. Now there is fear in him like a poison, like a leak in his hull that the void is flowing into. (That's not how physics works; Hux would object rather strongly to the simile.) He has mistaken Kylo Ren for being insensible, as well, not currently worth the effort of maintaining a barrier. Maybe he _is_ insensible; maybe it is not Kylo Ren who is thinking this now. Maybe it is just Hux bleeding through, bleeding all of that out into Kylo's brain. All that, and then whatever else there is about Kylo Ren's face that is not right somehow, which he feels all tangled up in that same fear.

There was a fight, he knows—the girl, so much stronger than Kylo had expected and with so much naive righteous fury—but Kylo could _teach_ her. He could have _explained_ —

No, evidently he could not have.

His face hurts, quite startlingly; a long gash of pain that has been there all along and that Kylo is just noticing. His side is... so wrong that he feels sick with it. Or perhaps he is sick with the drugs and it's that he can't breathe around the hurt in his side. But that could just as easily be a mechanical function of his injuries, which he can just about remember now and which must be... bad. Bad enough that Hux had come himself in such a lathered, furious, horrorstruck wall of incoherent feeling that even half-conscious Kylo had felt it like a fresh blow on top of all his other unbearable wounds. Certainly Kylo remembers _that_.

He remembers also: a bowcaster to the side. Prolonged exertion while bleeding copiously. Deliberate aggravation to the wound—not successful, but Kylo has not survived this long through a lack of resourcefulness. Still. A mistake, so add to that the hubris of thinking himself a Sith, to draw anything but weakness from his own pain. A lightsaber slash to the face, and... to the shoulder; his grandfather's blade. Gods only know what might be left of him. It's no wonder Hux is preoccupied with it. A long fall and a sudden halt (or perhaps he is mistaken and it was a sudden fall followed by a very long period of halting). Snow, and fire, and a planet split open—the great, abyssal rend of that, as well, as if it wasn't already a wounded half-hollow thing that should have welcomed death.

And then, like invoking his name has conjured him or like Kylo has closed his eyes and drifted again against nauseous pain, there Hux is. Kylo reaches for surprise and fails to find it. He doesn't move. Without having tested it, he suspects that he _cannot_ move.

He almost wishes he was unconscious again rather than immobile and aware of Hux still circling back on the exact same thing that is at the forefront of Kylo's own thoughts. It doesn't matter, it shouldn't matter, but in the midst of all the things that are far away and do not, somehow, affect him, the single thing that Kylo is imagining is his own face rent in two. Maybe like two halves of some summer fruit. All pink inside, all wet. All—pulpy.

There are different numbers now, for Hux—casualties, cost calculations, hours without sleep. Exhaustion that does nothing to dull the terror but only makes Hux himself dull and defeated on top of it. And Kylo. It's not _worry_ that Hux feels, not under all that stinking fear.

He reaches out across Kylo's body, Kylo feels him very close but can't or doesn't or won't move in response, and almost Kylo thinks that Hux will touch his forearm. He doesn't. He's all hours and dosages again, and he clicks something, some button, on the data array next to Kylo's cot.

It takes away every hurt Kylo has ever carried in a wave of such deep, sweet _emptiness_ that Kylo knows if Hux were to pull it away from him now, he would beg on his knees for more. It kills everything sharp, hushes to sleep everything that is wrong all at once.

He cannot say, an untellable, dilated amount of time later, whether he is awake or dreaming or both, but Hux has stayed. Or come back. At the forefront of Hux's mind is not Kylo's injury, now, but Kylo's _face_. Gone lax with what Hux must think is sleep, because Hux is thinking of—touch. Not of fruit pulp. Why did Kylo think that Hux should be thinking of melons?

Of touch because Kylo Ren is the dog that bites his master; the dog that, given pain, and hunger, and time, will turn and bite anyone at all. He has had all of these things in plenty, lately, and he has not thought of it in this way but perhaps so has Hux. Kylo Ren is a _father killer_ ; he feels this articulated clearly in Hux and it is not untrue although it is not true in precisely the way that Hux thinks of it. Hux thinks of it in some ways as a point of commonality between them. _That_ is so interesting, and so much more than Kylo has ever had from him before, that he almost misses following the trailing thought path to its conclusion. Hux thinks of touch because he thinks that Kylo Ren is drugged asleep and cannot hear him, because Hux is thinking of touching Kylo Ren. More precisely—Hux would like that, the _precision_ —he imagines how lax Kylo Ren would be now to his touch, how helpless, how pliant. He imagines how he could split Kylo Ren open—yes, and see the pulp of him.

How very alike he and Kylo are, after all.

"What's left of me?" Kylo asks, and he feels Hux startle. Must have attuned himself very closely indeed, to feel Hux viscerally like that, and all without meaning to. Snoke will be proud, to hear how strong he has become. Or furious. Snoke will be furious with Kylo, to hear how weak he has become—that he has lost control and slid into Hux, all unmeaning. He feels _mushy_. He feels Hux staring at him, alarmed and aware again that perhaps he should be careful. Too late for that, when Kylo hasn't been.

"Sorry," Kylo says, "can you feel how mashed-up I am? That's... not intentional, if you can."

Despite the fact that this is perfectly salient to their parallel trains of thought, Hux scoffs disbelievingly. "What," he says, not a question.

"Like a squashed redfruit," Kylo offers by way of explanation. It's a poor illustration, attached as it is to some sunken memory of sweetness. "Not so cool though. Hurts... some."

"Hurts more than _some_ , I would imagine." Hux closes his eyes—he hurts too, some—and relaxes. Kylo feels that relaxing, as well, and a flicker of personal triumph: he was right, Hux _does_ shield. When he thinks he needs to, which he seems to have forgotten is always. "You're drugged out of your mind, Ren. Please don't talk to me."

"Mmm. You always think I'm out of my mind. Like a mad dog. I can feel that."

"I've never tried to _hide_ that," Hux says, but his walls slam down like blast doors—there's serious metal fatigue, though, in those defenses. Now that Kylo knows they exist, now that Hux is so tired, he could crumple them with just a very little effort. He doesn't need to expend even that much. He's already in. Kylo sighs and it turns into a pained hiss when it meets the raw hole in his side that he'd almost forgotten.

"Snoke will not be... pleased with this." It's a lapse, certainly. One he can ill afford, he is afraid, given Snoke's recent clear opinions on the judgements that Kylo Ren has made. Given what has happened.

"A lapse is certainly one way to put it," Hux says, but he sounds only drily amused despite the bare periphery that Kylo can sense of what must be a vast stretch of throbbing pain. Failure, ache, terror.

" _Ren_ ," Hux snarls suddenly, so caustic with rage in his voice and in his mind that Kylo actually makes the effort to look at him and finds him white-lipped with it, "you will _cease to speak to me_."

At this point it occurs to Kylo that he must be saying more than he'd thought he was out loud. Drooling out words around the drugs and the haze; how disquieting.

"Hux," he asks, all at once alert enough to be curious and still too tired to care beyond that, "why have you come here? You're exhausted. And you will not be... spared Snoke's reprimand. Any more than will I. This will not win you his favour."

Hux lurches up out of his seat to bend over Kylo, so close and incandescent with anger and—outraged privacy, bizarre thought, he _knows_ Kylo Ren is a mind reader, and the sense of the unreasonableness of the emotion is Hux's own thought and not Kylo's—his breath stings hotly against what must be a smaller bandage than Kylo had feared. Reflected in Hux, Kylo finally sees himself coloured sharply in saturated, uncurdled anger: just a new, pink scar. It runs the full length of his face, a frightening thing, but it is his own face still. Hux's rage is so brilliant that Kylo knows with a flat factuality that he means to finish the damage that the girl started. He holds himself still for it. Hux moves with a sudden violence and does not strike Kylo. Instead he grabs for the data bank at Kylo's side, and he must press the same button that he'd pressed before.

Kylo is gone, completely.

Kylo is... whole.

Kylo is thinking of sleep, the next time he is aware of thinking anything. He imagines, vividly, pulling every regulation and non-regulation blanket that he can commandeer over his head and sleeping blankly for a month, for a year. Imagines just curling up and staying there for an eternity and damning this ship and everyone on it to the long, cold black of the very edges of space.

Of course it is Hux, with his spine set drill-sergeant straight in a chair in the corner of the room, who is imagining this. Longing for it, really, with all the iron strength that he is using to keep his body upright and unbowed.

"There is fear in you," Kylo says, not because he thinks that Hux might be unaware of it but because if he is going to speak to Hux he will at the very least do so on purpose. "Like a rift all the way through you. I can feel it, did you know that? A great big _crack_ —I could never feel you at all, before. Well, hardly at all."

Hux says nothing but his longings—cold, silence, oblivion—take on the edge of mania.

"Now it's all I can feel. I could crawl right inside you, right where you're so messy and soft. I could hurt you to do it. I wouldn't have to. I... understand it. I have known fear, as well."

When Hux scrubs his hand over his closed eyes as if to close Kylo out (as if he _could_ close Kylo out) he can feel that too.

"What do you want from me, Ren? My condolences for your difficult past? Or your abysmal decision-making?" He sounds horrible. It _hurts_ , to be Hux. That's not the Force telling Kylo that, just the strain in every part of him. Surely the medi-droids should be involved, should be trying to diagnose and dose and mend their commanding officer. Hux pinches the bridge of his nose, right between the pained furrow of his forehead, and then straightens again. Maybe he's pulled rank and ordered them out of the room. "I am sorry, then, that you have once experienced such an unpleasant emotion as fear. I presume you have meditated on it and cast it out." Hux looks straight at Kylo and even manages a smirk, but his heart—or whatever cold chrysalis he has where a heart might ordinarily have grown—isn't in it.

Still. He's not as incorrect as he might be. "I had... tried. At first. Yes." Kylo can feel Hux's mirthless disbelief at that. He supposes it was something of an embarrassingly gauche answer to what had not, perhaps, been a real question, so he does not elaborate. "Has anyone ever told you, General, that your mind is singularly insectile? All hydraulics, no warmth. Even now, when you assume that you are being carried to your death. You set the Finalizer's course yourself. Do you... care? Or do you merely fear to die?"

"I thought you could feel me," Hux says, as if the question of his own mortality so repulses him that he would rather have Kylo Ren in his head than discuss it aloud. Perhaps he would. Perhaps it is not death, after all, that frightens him.

How refreshingly uncommon.

"I can. You're a bit like a mantis. Keen eyes and poor self-preservation. It's hard to differentiate lack of foresight from lack of basic concern in a creature of your type."

Hux is silent, and the inside of his head is silent, and then there's a _noise_ that Kylo takes a long time to recognize as the very first time he has ever heard Hux truly laugh. He had not thought to imagine it. If he had, it would not have sounded like _that_. "A _mantis_ ," Hux gasps. "You worry my mate will eat me alive? Well. You needn't."

"Not your mate," Kylo says, thinking of how soft and faraway the edges of the room are, even now. "Your... desires. Your past, your ambition. Lack of self-preservation, Hux—you are steering your ship towards nothing. Just a black hole. Just... cold." Hux, no longer laughing, stands abruptly. Kylo wishes he would give him another blanket. "Will you push that button again?"

"No." Hux is gone from Kylo's field of vision and all that's left of him is the steady clack of boot heels on the steel floor. Then there is nothing left of him at all and Kylo is alone. He is shivering with cold, with void. And he is awake.

**Author's Note:**

> (The epigraph quotation is the example from the entry for "void" in my Roget's Pocket Thesaurus. I'm not joking.)


End file.
